I read a statement the other day that went something like
“people aren’t afraid of technology itself, but rather what capitalism will do with it”
and I can’t stop thinking about it. It has been resonating inside my brain case for days since I first saw it mentioned. I’ve heard it before, but this time it has really stuck with me.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think a truer statement has ever been made.
The sentiment behind this observation is the basis for the eminently meme-worthy refrain of “this is why we can’t have nice things”, because nothing good, or labor-saving, or useful can exist for very long before someone will always try to control, monetize, or profit from it as a consequence of our money-obsessed society. The makers can’t make it and give it away for free because they need some compensation for the time spent doing the work just in order to live, and the powerful (through capital) want to keep all the money for themselves in order to share that power with as few other people as possible and retain as much of it for themselves so that they can impose their will upon everyone else.
This is because the end result of capitalism is fascism, and a society ruled by wealthy techbros that are the worst kind of aesthetic “cyberpunks” (because they’ve completely missed the repeated warnings and got the completely and utterly wrong message from the literature) will never do anything that lessens their power and control over Society by increasing equality. They will always do what’s best for them, which means being the fascist dictators of their own nation-states. Anything that weakens their grasp of power or decreases society’s reliance on them “to know what’s best” is perceived as a threat, especially when it comes to technology.
The Network State
By way of example, check out this discussion between Taylor Lorenz and Gil Duran about how Silicon Valley has been working for years to dismantle democracy through their idea of “The Network State”, bringing technofeudalism off the digital wires of the Internet into a real-life police state headed up by billionaire tech people. It’s all about an ideology where hyper-wealthy people “know what’s best for you” simply because they are wealthy so therefore they must be smart. This video is a bit dated, but it’s absolutely still relevant and after watching this, it makes Elon’s machinations with DOGE a whole hell of a lot more sinister as it seems to be implementing this concept of “voice” on a national scale to mount a technofeudalist coup in the United States (or at the very least pave the way to make it much, much easier for these jokers to implement their vision of How Things Should Work(TM).
I think that capitalism gets called out specifically here because it’s the primary example of a system where people have to pay just in order to live a basic life and where the term “the cost of living” is a consensual hallucination accepted by anyone that lives under it. Anything that is good, saves any sort of labor, or improves the quality of life of the proletariat inherently lessens that death grip of control that the corpos have, which threatens the system under which they thrive. So of course they’re not just going to let it go. That will make the workers too happy and too comfortable, and we can’t have that! Otherwise they won’t let us exploit them for our sole benefit!
But as I think about it, the more I’m thinking that I would replace “capitalsim” with “power”, or maybe just “humanity”. I’m not trying to give capitalism a pass here, like it’s the nerdy kid who’s been picked on enough already, because I hate it as much as the next guy and would love to see it go the way of the dodo with a quickness; I just think in this context it’s maybe a false-flag or red herring that distracts from the real root cause, which I believe to be humanity itself.
I come to this conclusion because [WARNING! Incoming Debbie Downer Buzzkill Alert!] I personally don’t believe that humans are inherently “good” and capable of living completely selflessly for the good of the collective over an entire lifetime. While there are some in the grand scheme of things that can live fulfilling and seemingly selfless lives as compared to the rest of us, I tend to believe that the vast majority of us (if not all) will live our lives in small, self-serving manners; it’s just that some of us are better than others at convincing ourselves that we’re happier when everyone else is happy.
However, the real danger here is not whether or not the rank and file are inherently selfish in their daily, common, and mundane lives but more about how a human being will choose to act once they have acquired any sort of power. And once a single human being acquires an outsized proportion of that power, they may start to think that their solutions and their way of seeing the world is right for everyone else. They start drinking their own Kool-Aid, as it were. And in a capitalist society, what’s the quickest way to acquiring enough power to impose your will upon others? You guessed her, Chester: show me the money!
Hint: If you want to get a true picture of who a person is, give them power and a platform. They’ll tell you pretty quick, because without sufficient checks to reign them in, they can’t hide their true selves for very long. And when they tell you, you best believe ‘em because once they get enough of that power you’ll see that they weren’t kidding. The problem is that no matter how much foresight they claim to have, no one is likely to see the hidden or unforseen consequences of those actions coming until it’s too late.
This is essentially what the core story in Pantheon is all about - a billionaire who’s all in on “Uploaded Intelligences” (converting human beings into purely digital beings in “the cloud”) is ostensibly doing it because “that’s humanity’s next logical evolutionary step”. But of course, there are undertones of wanting to live forever, the consequences of a partially “converted” society and how the two sides interact, unchecked power, uploading against one’s will, etc., etc., etc.
(By the way, if you’ve not yet watched Pantheon, you really should as it sort of fits the current technological zeitgeist amazingly well.)
The plot of Pantheon is basically summarizing the current debates on AI and the race towards the Singularity - the convergence of human and machine interfacing that ushers in the next stage of human evolution. There are other shows and books that have explored these ideas so there’s not really any new ground being broken here; maybe it’s just being approached from a slightly different angle that is easier to understand and the current state of affairs just makes it that much more poignant at this particular moment.
In all this sort of media that I can think of though - things like Altered Carbon, Tokyo Override, Blade Runner, Elysium - any technology that is sufficiently groundbreaking and makes life easier or even safer is always, ALWAYS available to the super-rich first (the ones least in need of it) and it takes an interminably long time to trickle down to the average citizen - if it even becomes commonplace at all. Why? Because technology is a game of power, profit, and control and allows the wielder of enough of it to leapfrog various stages of human evolution.
“With great power comes great responsibility” yadda, yadda, yadda. I have yet to see a human being that has been able to successfully wield the great power that they have been given with consistently great responsibility. And technology of any sort is the primary tool of fascism, particularly digital technology because it is binary and purely logical. 1’s and 0’s, right and wrong, black and white. It follows rules and cannot break them - only humans can do that. From a certain point of view, digital technology is inherently fascist by virtue of its design. Of course technofascists are going to use it to bring about actual fascism in the real world.
Here’s why I say this: a secondary definition of the term fascism from the Merriam-Webster dictionary reads thusly:
a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
There is no “gray” in a binary world. I summarize this by thinking of Kyle Rees’s famous line from The Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it will keep coming, and it will not stop.” You can apply this to firearms, possibly the deadliest technology that humanity has ever invented and the often repeated phrase of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Guns have two states: firing and not firing, and even in the “not firing” state, the mere threat of the switch is enough to convince most people to do what the person holding the gun wants them to do. The question is who controls them and is (quite literally in this case) pulling the trigger to unleash their capability. And guns are one of the primary tools of fascists.
Based on all this, the only way that this technology can ever be controlled and democratized is if a society in totality is 100% collectively committed to maintaining the equality that any tech brings. If even one person is allowed to misuse that technology for their own personal gain or to exploit the system, then the seeds of fascism are already taking root and it’s just a matter of time before the power imbalance begins anew, and that will necessarily result in fascism which will destroy any utopia that may exist. I submit that there is not a human being that has ever been born or ever will be that is capable of resisting the lure and siren song of power and pride that technology can offer through misuse, unless society is unwaveringly and ruthlessly willing to cut out any deviation from or imbalance in societal equity as a whole the instance it is detected. In this respect, technology must be a zero-sum game, because the human element is too chaotic and unpredictable to allow; either everyone has it at full capability or no one does.
Human beings are, and always will be, the ghost in the machine.
